French Revolutions

bottle of pink champagne inside me, and because having
put it there in a very small number of minutes I was already strangely
untroubled by the negative aspects of my environment, and because the reason I
had put it there was because I had done it. I had gone all the way round an enormous
country, all the way across Europe’s hugest range of mountains: 2,952
kilometres, with almost 10 per cent of them in a single historic day. I had
done all these things, and here was the bit I still couldn’t get over as I
jostled out into the zigzagging scooters and the apple-polishing Turkish
grocers and the mincing old women walking their Pekineses: I had done them on a
stupid bloody bicycle.
    Feeling smug and splendid and
world-famous, I promenaded luxuriously up to the Place d’Italie. It was remarkable
that somewhere so humdrum by Parisian standards — this was just one of the
minor étoiles, those vast roundabouts where boulevards converge — could seem
the epitome of Continental sophistication in British terms. The nearest
equivalent in London would be some brutalist concrete nightmare, a gyratory
wasteland such as the Elephant & Castle. But here there was space and
light and the huge glass wall of a daring new cinema complex and cobbles and
ashlar and bars with outside tables: a proper urban focus for a proper urban
community.
    Sweden were playing Turkey and the
local supporters of the latter team were out in force, filling the bars to the
rafters and standing on chairs outside to get a view of the telly. It was all
terribly exciting. I had a peek through one door and in seven loud seconds
established that far post was ‘deuxième poteau’ and that Ross from Friends was playing on the left side of the Turkish midfield. And it was good to hear
that even in such an environment, ‘ooh la la’ remains the exhilarated
Parisian’s default expression.
    I found an outside table at a bar
that wasn’t showing the game, next to two old men almost inevitably playing
chess. Lovers were sitting on the statues around us, stroking each other’s warm
faces in the 9 p.m. sun, and as my tall glass of cold beer arrived I surveyed
the scene with the avuncular fondness of the reasonably plastered. But then,
succumbing to this same group’s vulnerability to wild swings of emotion, I
suddenly felt a profound sadness. A snapshot photographed by my eyes the
previous day was belatedly developed in my brain, and as it took shape I found
myself looking at three teenage girls silently sharing a Coke outside a bar
flanked by abandoned homes in a decaying rural town strung carelessly along
both sides of a thundering main road.
    How could you expect any young person
to put up with a life like that when they could be having a life like this? The
girls were mentally thumbing a lift from anything that passed — they even
plotted my weary passage through their lives with glum envy — and one day soon
someone would stop and pick them up and they’d be off. It was tragic to think
that when the Tour first visited Londun or Obterre, or Carpentras or Chaumont
or a thousand semi-derelict towns in between, each had been as vibrant as this
in its own modest way, each had its own thronging Place d’ltalie. But
industrialisation and social mobility and any number of other demographic
phenomena had lured people away to the cities, and even those rural towns that
weren’t just slinking off to die alone were doomed. They’d pay their million
francs and string up their bunting and resurface their mini-roundabouts, but
when the Tour came to town, that one day of sex and speed would only serve to
highlight the snail-paced, strait-laced parochialism of the other 364.
    I made my way back to the hotel, as
wistful as it’s possible to be with a leaking kebab in your mouth. The traffic
was still insane at 10.30 and I knew that my final trans-Parisian stage would
be feasible only at dawn, and that consequently I should go to bed straight
away.
    Bed was one thing; sleep was another.
The sackcloth sheets were too short for the mattress and against my shaven
shins the horsehair blanket felt like the rough grope of a lust-fogged drunk.
That was how it started. The night before I had fallen immediately into a
fatigued coma; only now, as the bedding rasped against my silken skin, did I
notice how peculiar it felt to have hairless legs. Suddenly I couldn’t keep my
hands off them. Wobbling the firm, smooth bulk of those enormously bulked-up
calves, as meaty and